Fredericton Police Force The council has been asked to try to ascertain the reasons why people are living in tents and not accessing emergency shelters and aids.
Chief Martin Gaudet made a presentation to the council on the Living Rough file and showed the council how many calls the police made to contain the tents in the city.
“Some of these intakes and conversations take days,” he said, speaking to the city’s Committee of Public Safety on Thursday.
He said there are about 350 pin drops on the map, but it does not necessarily indicate the number of tents people are occupying. Gaudet said it could be one tentacle or six in one location.
The 350 pin drops represent calls to service at tents across the city, but not how many tents would have been there.
Fredericton Police Force / Submission
Country. Cassandra LeBlanc asks Gaudet to try to track down the reasons “why we people are choosing” to live in tents.
“We really have to start involving the people living on the streets,” she said Thursday. “I think we have a way through opportunity.”
LeBlanc asked if this tracking was possible and whether it could be provided to the Council.
Gaudet said he knows homelessness is a crisis.
“We want to be at the table. We are not the driving force here. We are not going to save ourselves from homelessness,” he said in an interview Friday.
He admits that it will be really difficult to pin down the reasons and tell the councilors about it on Thursday.
Many emergency shelters in the city require someone to stay cool or dry. They can’t bring much luggage, or take their pets with them. Women and men who are in a relationship should go to separate shelters.
“There’s a lot of complexity in these situations. It’s not taken lightly by us,” Gaudet said.
In 2021, there were approved tent sites which were visited by the police, frequently checking those living there to ensure their safety. In 2022, after the tents caught fire twice during the previous winter, the city ordered police to escort people and remove the tent sites as they moved out.
Dr Sarah Davidson, of the River Stone Recovery Centre, said policy changes forced people to move quickly and often left them a little outside the support they had.
Davidson said it’s fair to ask why to help guide how to do things differently.
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“It’s really destabilizing, unfortunately,” she said in an interview on Friday. “Imagine coming home every day and your house is gone… and so they’re saying where do I go?”
He said that people are trying to live better.
“They have all kinds of things, like the kids’ photo albums, they don’t want to give up,” she said. “So there’s a big choice, are you going to drop everything to go in.”
Davidson said the reason emergency shelters were built no longer reflected the reality of what was needed to help people.
“Why … aren’t we looking more closely at specific housing to meet these needs?” He said. “So, the question of asking why people are not visiting sites that may or may not be available is a really relevant one to ask so that we can learn what to do differently.” Is.”
He said the police could be on the table for a solution, but the data would have to be collected by someone who hasn’t already been exposed to people’s distrust of the system, adding that the decision-making process really needs to be about homelessness. There is no meaningful change without involving the people who experience it.
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